Vilsack to meet with farm-bill players

The four top House and Senate players on the farm bill are scheduled to meet Thursday with Agriculture Secy. Tom Vilsack, a luncheon which has taken on added importance given the growing pressure for some resolution before the end of next month.

Consumers are threatened by a potential doubling in milk prices January 1, absent some action by Congress. And Vilsack and the Agriculture Committees must soon decide if they have any real shot of wrapping a five-year farm bill into whatever deficit reduction package emerges from talks now between the White House and Congress.

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Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, the ranking Republican on the Senate panel, told POLITICO Tuesday that he felt encouraged by the administration to pursue this strategy. And Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the committee’s chairwoman, has signaled that this is very much the direction she is taking as well.

At the same time, their House counterparts, Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) and Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the ranking Democrat, appear more hesitant after being stymied from bringing their own bill to the House floor.

Lucas remains hemmed in by his own Republican leadership, which has barred any floor debate. And the result has been an especially irritating situation for Peterson, a former chairman and activist by nature as a legislator

Lucas’s staff downplayed the Thursday session. “This is not a new development,” said Tamara Hinton, communications director. “It’s lunch with the secretary that’s been scheduled for weeks.”

But Peterson, who met himself with the secretary after the election, was more bullish. And it is possible that that what began as a Vilsack-Lucas lunch has been expanded to include all of the players, who haven’t been all together in one such meeting for months, Peterson said.

“We’ll have an opportunity to meet and re-engage,” Peterson told POLITICO. “Let’s get this thing done.”

The Minnesota Democrat has grown more agitated as the January deadline approaches without any resolution of the expiring dairy provisions. He is the prime architect behind a new approach to dairy policy that does away with the price supports of the past and tries instead to stabilize markets by better controlling production levels.